It is a well known fact that children and young adults watch much too much television. In fact, it is a well known fact that when television dominates most of the child leisure time, little time is left for unstructure play activities and for the development of interpersonal skills and friendships.
The extent of violence on television is another valid reason for the concern of many parents about how much television is watched by a child.
There have been devices in the past which attempt to restrict the amount of time television but typically become nothing more than "policeman" type devices which were easily defeated by the child or were typically cumbersome and unproductive to the childs well being. For example, devices such as that disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,566,033 to Reidenouer utilize tokens that require strict parental involvement in not only accessing how much television a particular child is watching but also the physical handing out of tokens be used in metering the time periods to indirectly restrict the television watching activity. Furthermore, in homes with more than one child or in situations with friends and neighbors, the pooling or collective use of tokens defeats the intended purpose of those devices to police or restrict use of television viewing. The present invention proceeds not only to avoid these problems but to perform an entirely different task.
The present invention takes a sophisticated approach of directing and encouraging a child to perform positive tasks and thereby earning television viewing time. This is a vastly different approach than just correcting good behavior as that disclosed in Reidenouer. With devices such as Reidenouer, the parent had to first recognize the good behavior (or the lack of bad behavior) of a child and then enter, either by token or other means, the amount of television viewing time into a device to regulate the amount of television watching available for the child. In an age of both parents working and the commonness of latch-key kids, this obviously is not a workable solution. Especially when there may be many children behaving well and other children who are not performing good tasks that are benefiting by the good behavior of a sibling.
Furthermore, the use of tokens created problems not only having them passed out to the child but problems with the transferring and selling among friends and other family members. Also, the swallowing of the tokens becomes a health concern. The present invention utilizes a totally different concept of various rewardable-earnable tasks which allows variable television viewing ability. It furthermore, and very importantly, provides the advantages to the child that they have their own virtually limitless incentive to earn television watching time based on the performance of various good deeds such as homework and exercise. Also, they would be able to select what to watch and when including the accumulation of such television watching time for use at later times for further enjoyment. All of this is accomplished without the day to day involvement of a guardian/parent to implement the earn-per-view method each day.
The invention claimed herein and described more particularly in the preferred embodiment, relates to an earn-per-view type of television viewing regulation system whereas the interaction between a child and guardian or parent is not necessary to earn or to recognize the earning of television viewing time.
The present invention still affords the flexibility of the parental override not only for lockout, but further to index the television viewing system to afford so much television viewing per the desire of the guardian or parent besides or in addition to the time the child earns to view the television based on their own performance and completion of positive tasks. The present invention also may be manually overriden by the parent to afford unrestricted unaccounted or unearned viewing. This override may be even non-time specific.
It is important to note, that psychologists have found that pursuing a plan in which it rewards not just good behavior but actually the accomplishing of positive specific tasks is highly important to the development of the child and for better family harmony by accomplishing specific tasks around the home.
The tasks that the child may accomplish are many and varied. Some suggested tasks are exercise machines such as rowing machines and stationary bikes, to encourage the child to exercise instead of sitting for long periods of time and watching television. The period of time accomplishing the positive task and thereby earned, provides the appropriate television viewing time.
Furthermore, the use of a computer in which the child does specific homework problems such as learning a foreign language, mathematics, science or grammatical sentence correction, spelling, etc. while using the computer program to be scored as to the accomplishment and completion to provide a certain period of time of television view.
Other types of positive specific tasks may be used to input to the present invention to earn specific time for viewing the television. As shown and described in the preferred embodiment, an exercise bicycle, electronic glove or bilateral motion detector, or personal computer with educational software among other positive tasks can all be inputs to the earning recognition device. The electronic glove may be used with positive tasks such as cleaning, playing educational games or even musical instruments.
It is also understood that the present invention is intended to include many positive tasks which are healthy, helpful and educational as well as enjoyable. The rewards may, as desired, be the ability to play video games, view video tapes or other popular television type activities hopefully are of the type to be productive to the development of a child as well as entertaining.
Numerous other advantages and features of the invention will become readily apparent from the detailed description of the preferred embodiment of the invention, from the claims, and from the accompanying drawings, in which like numerals are employed to designate like parts throughout the same.